Thems
Jun 16, 2014·Tap to summarize
Feature image by Matthew Palladino. Listen: Your browser does not support the audio element.Click here for the mp3. Raillan says beginnings. Wilkinson, on the other hand— Nalini says Milli Vanilli or Nilla Wafers were my father’s favorite. I feel you I feel you I keep saying—back carved into a loaf of back carved twice will twist the spine and make one leg shorter, one barrel of a chest, confusing body movements that smooth when the diaphragm’s in heavy use—I feel you I feel you I keep saying, which means: constant pain and paying attention. I feel you I keep saying amid a burst of incoherent language, language being the thing that we pour, molten, and cool and use and chip and melt down and I don’t know what to say when my date waves—“reading is boring.” That he’d never before finished a book because words don’t “grab” him, his attention. And I wanted to say atten- tion is a resource, the groundwater, the condensation, the band of elemental scar tissue protects us from solar wind. Like a joint passed back and forth until it singes our lips—You have to grab each other. So terror tallies shorter and shorter, so Jacob says or was it Mason? Maybe the names are more like Chunky and Young- bird, Chuka, Limpy n them and I say “and them” and mean how in “the sticks” where I lived, the reservation, the mail- boxes were like maypoles at the end of the Earth I mean beginning of the dirt road that leads to the home that is no longer there, but I rest my cheek against the cool linoleum of my memory whenever Canal Street is too thick or the subway slams into the two men fighting in front of me and how generally, Limpy n them and Beebee and Angel and Turtle and Sterling n them and Chop n them someone would drive home and say who’s that at the mailbox and you would suck your teeth and say Bee Sting n them and you generally don’t want to be one of them, but if needed, if some- one was messin with you at school they and them burned with intimidation—I would say them would literally fight all your battles for you.
